AllanThinks

So...

This afternoon, I was playing around a bit with the design of the blog. I haven't changed anything about this blog in ages. The Typepad Dashboard is a lot different than it was the last time I did anything to the design and layout. It's going to take a lot of study and practice before I do anything major.

One thing I noticed when I was going through my sidebar content was that my blog roll was gone. So I tried to go to Blogrolling, where my blog roll was hosted, only to discover that Blogrolling ceased operations last November. The last remnants of it will disappear on April 1 of this year, so if you used Blogrolling, you should remove any code related to it from your blog template.

I'd like to create a new blog roll, but am not really sure how to go about it in the new Typepad. Are there any other third-party blog roll servers like Blogrolling out there? Do you use one? If so, which one, and why?

Let me know in the comments.

This is a first for me.

I received my first ever Internet flame today.

Ali, Jo Ann, and I had returned home after attending the UK-Vandy basketball game. Vandy won the game, which kind of took the shine off of my day.

I sat down at the computer to check my email and a few of my regular haunts. For some reason, I decided to check my Statcounter log (something I rarely do). I noticed six entries in a row, all from the same referrer source.   The URL was from the San Francisco Bay Craigslist.

I was curious why people would be visiting my blog from such a place, so I clicked on the link.

Here is the text of the message in case it has  already been deleted.

please help me (capitola)

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Reply to: pers-265507811@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-01-20, 12:46PM PST

write these people and help shatter their goofy east coast addiction to themselves and not each other.

Or is that my bnitter west coast attitude?

either way...allan seems like a moron with a camera and camera people suck chuck.,

http://www.allanthinks.com/allanthinks/

• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Posting ID: 265507811

My jaw dropped when I read this. I've had Internet accounts since 1986 and this is the first time such a thing has happened to me.

I been around long enough to know that the Internet is full of angry, unhappy, and troubled people who take delight in flaming and harassing others. But as I said, I've managed to avoid this sort of thing for 21 years.

In the couple of hours since I discovered this, I've received 34 hits from Craigslist. None of the visitors have left a comment, so I guess none of them took offense to my writing or photography.

So, welcome newcomers! Thanks for stopping by. I hope you find something of interest here, and I hope you continue to read my weblog.

I emailed the poster of the message and politely asked them why they had posted it. I doubt I will receive a reply.

Identity

About a year ago, Ali and I registered domain names for ourselves. AliThinks for her, AllanThinks for me.

The registrar we used offered a decent price, but as it turned out, they didn't offer much in the way of service. Our new domains never seemed to propagate through the Internet like we thought, and never really seemed to stick to our blogs like we had hoped.

We forgot about it for several months. In the spring, I transfered my domain to another registrar that I had heard about from a fellow blogger, but I still couldn't seem to map the new domain to my blog. I thought I was following all I had learned from Typepad and the registrar, but nothing seemed to work.

So, once again, I let it go and forgot all about it.

About six weeks ago, Ali brought the subject up again and we decided to finally do something about it.

She transfered her domain to a new registrar that Typepad had in its recommended list, and I did the same. Once the transfer was confirmed, we again made the changes to the DNS settings recommended by Typepad, and finally everything fell into place. We were finally able to map our new domains to our blogs.

So now you can reach this weblog by typing nothing more than allanthinks.com into your browser location bar. This should make it easier for the couple of people I see in my logs who everyday search Google for AllanThinks.

If you have my blog in your blogroll, feel free to change the link to the new domain of allanthinks.com. Or not.

The old address of allanthinks.typepad.com will still work. But the new address is more succinct, and should make getting here easier for all.

I hope fame doesn't go to his head.

Mr. Jones is Catmodel of the Week over at the blog home of the Carnival of the Cats.

Dear reader,

Please look carefully at the web address in the URL field of your browser. It should read ‘http://allanthinks.typepad.com‘. In case you see a web address containing the word ‘bitacle’ or ‘bitacle.org’, you’re not looking at the original page on which this text was posted. If this is the case, the text you are reading right now might be incorrect or out of date. After I place a post on my weblog, I always try to keep published information up to date, or incorporate additional information, which I receive from readers. You will never find this information on bitacle.org.

Bitacle.org copies the content of weblogs without permission of the author, the holder of copyrights or the licensee. By visiting bitacle.org, you create income for the people who run bitacle.org, at the expense of me and other owners of a weblog, without permission and often without respecting copyrights and/or terms of use as in a license. So please, next time you want to view my posts, do so by using the web address of my weblog, which is ‘http://allanthinks.typepad.com‘. Please make a bookmark of my weblog’s address, if you would like to visit it again.

Thank you!

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This post is stickied and will remain at the top of the page for a while. This was suggested by the folks at Stop Bitacle.org. Hopefully if enough bloggers do this it might put pressure on bitacle to stop stealing content.

Crikey!

You people sure are wordy. Checking my Bloglines feeds last night, I discovered eleventy bajillion (not a real number, but representative of how darn many new articles I found) new entries.

I did my best last night and this morning to read them all. I ended up skimming over many of them, and refrained from commenting on any of them, despite wanting to comment on so many of your entries.

We still haven't unpacked our bags, so we have much to do today. Hopefully, once the chores are done, I will be able to keep up with all y'all once again.

More about our trip later.

Typepad is great. Except when it's not.

Comments left yesterday by several of my constant readers have disappeared due to a problem at Typepad.

The Typepad posting application was down for most of yesterday while repairs to some database were being done.

Apparently, any changes to a blog during that downtime were likely lost, and I lost three comments.

Poof! Gone!

The comments did publish, and I read them last evening. I even have email notifications of them, but those comments are now absent from the blog.

I apologize for that. Rest assured that I did read your comments and appreciate them so very much. I will reply to them via email as soon as I have another free moment.

Another ch-ch-ch-ch-change

Subscribing to the RSS feed for AllanThinks should be quicker and simpler now that I have consolidated all the available feeds via Feedburner. The two or three different links I had in the sidebar to do this have been replaced with a single icon:

Clicking it in the sidebar will take you to a page where you can easily add my feed to your favorite online or offline feed aggregator, such as Bloglines and Yahoo.

If you already subscribe to one of the existing feeds (Atom, RDF, or XML), you should not have to change a thing. Cooperation between Typepad and Feedburner made the transition automatic and transparent, and all feeds should be synchronized.

Beside making it easier for my readers to subscribe to the blog, this change will make it easier for me to keep track of who my regular readers are.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I spent some time this evening cleaning up the sidebar of the blog. I removed a bunch of links listed under Other Stuff and reordered what was left.

I also moved my blogrolls to a page of their own. They can be accessed by licking the link under the heading Bloggy Goodness.

I've received some comments recently indicating that my blog was slow to load. I hope the housecleaning will speed things up a bit.